Monday, December 22, 2014

During my early years with PC I love to play "Leisure Suit Larry" (especially part 1 to 3 which has running on CGA or Hercules graphics card). Author of this games, Al Lowe had a good sense of humor and every time you failed your mission or stuck in a place - there was an pop up on the screen "Al says: save early, save often". After today fight with Oracle I should remember a next saying - "Relink after, relink always".Let me explain what what happen today.There used to be old Oracle bug in 11.2g which I described here. Basically Oracle Restart was not aware of role changes and could open a database in wrong mode after role switch. I created a workaround for it but I was really waiting for a patch. During a UKOUG 2014 I was speaking with Oracle Data Guard Product Manager - Larry Carpenter - and I learned that patch is ready. I asked @UweHesse for details and I got my numbers back - patch 15986647 and it is included in latest PSU 11.2.0.4.4.After I got this information I was happy - I just applied this PSU last week, so let's test it.The first run looked OK - after switchover Oracle Restart displayed proper role and start-up option on new primary

Start up option was still open instead of mount. Hmmm, I was sure that both nodes are same but again I reconfigure Data Guard Broker and Oracle Restart - no change - issue was resolved on the one server only. Then I decided to double check if I have this PSU installed, and I found out that everything was in order in terms of PSU.

This is quite strange and a little bit scary. I have installed all PSU using opatch auto from Grid Infrastructure Home and there was no errors but relinking Oracle Home actually fix a problem which was included in the patch.